If you’re a guy growing up in a small Texas school it is pretty much fact that you are going to play football. For me, it was a small Baptist school and several football induced injuries. That is why I was surprised when ESPN Magazine included an article about two Texas schools I’m fairly familiar with – Grapevine Faith and Gainesville State School.
ESPN’s Rick Reilly tells the story of what he calls "the oddest game in high school football history" down in Grapevine, Texas last month. Now I’m pretty use to schools like my own and Grapevine Faith being the hub of the Christian Right and football. Rarely do they do anything to show love, kindness, or caring. This is football after all.
But, from the beginning Grapevine Faith vs. Gainesville State School was a bit strange. For instance, the Gainesville players (the away team) took the field and found a 40-yard spirit line of people rooting for them. (This is a practice, if your unfamiliar with high-school football, where the fans of the home team make a pathway of people for their team’s players to run through). The fans of Grapevine Faith had made a "spirit line" for Gainesville State’s players.
That never happened when I played football. Further, the Grapevine Faith folks "even made a banner for players to crash through at the end. It said, "Go Tornadoes!" Which is also weird, because Faith is the Lions."
Now, as I’m reading this I'm thinking of the "Wayside School is Falling Down" books of my childhood where everything is backwards.
As the Gainesville State players arrived at their bench – on the away side of the field – they found 200 Faith fans rooting for them by name. Ok, a little creepy and odd. Though, admittedly, we would often learn the names of other team’s players in order to taunt them – not cheer for them.
Isaiah, middle linebacker and Quarterback for Gaineville told reporter Reilly that, "I never in my life thought I'd hear people cheering for us to hit their kids...I wouldn't expect another parent to tell somebody to hit their kids. But they wanted us to!"
Reilly then reports the cause of all this strangeness:
And even though Faith walloped them 33-14, the Gainesville kids were so happy that after the game they gave head coach Mark Williams a sideline squirt-bottle shower like he'd just won state. Gotta be the first Gatorade bath in history for an 0-9 coach.
But then you saw the 12 uniformed officers escorting the 14 Gainesville players off the field and two and two started to make four. They lined the players up in groups of five—handcuffs ready in their back pockets—and marched them to the team bus. That's because Gainesville is a maximum-security correctional facility 75 miles north of Dallas. Every game it plays is on the road.
Kris Hogan, head coach of Faith, wanted to do something nice for the Gainesville team. He knew his team was going to win - Faith was 7-2 and Gainesville way 0-8 with only two TDs scored all year. Gainesville was an unorganized group of drug, arson, assault, robbery, etc. convicts - many of whose families could really care less about them - with one coach and seven-year-old equipment. This wasn't going to match up well against Faith's - best of the private schools - 11 coach staff, new training equipment, active booster club, nice training facility, and so on.
So Hogan suggested a unique idea:
What if half of our fans—for one night only—cheered for the other team? He sent out an email asking the Faithful to do just that. "Here's the message I want you to send:" Hogan wrote. "You are just as valuable as any other person on planet Earth."
A few were a little thrown by Hogan's suggestion. Of of his players asked, "Coach, why are we doing this?" Hogan replied, "Imagine if you didn't have a home life. Imagine if everybody had pretty much given up on you. Now imagine what it would mean for hundreds of people to suddenly believe in you."
So it happened. The Gainesville Tornadoes, for the first time ever, had fans! And, yes, even cheerleaders.
"I thought maybe they were confused," said Alex, a Gainesville lineman (only first names are released by the prison). "They started yelling 'DEE-fense!' when their team had the ball. I said, 'What? Why they cheerin' for us?'"
It was a strange experience for boys who most people cross the street to avoid. "We can tell people are a little afraid of us when we come to the games," says Gerald, a lineman who will wind up doing more than three years. "You can see it in their eyes. They're lookin' at us like we're criminals. But these people, they were yellin' for us! By our names!"
Ok - sorry folks - but this part is going to be a little evangelical. We still pray after private school football games in Texas. But rather than being the stick-it-in-your-face prayer (i.e. Gov. Rick Perry) that many schools engage in, this prayer was something different.
Isaiah, the linebacker/quarterback for Gainesville - to everyone's surprise - asked to lead the prayer. "We had no idea what the kid was going to say," said Coach Hogan. But this was Isaiah's prayer: "Lord, I don't know how this happened, so I don't know how to say thank You, but I never would've known there was so many people in the world that cared about us."
Reilly writes:
And it was a good thing everybody's heads were bowed because they might've seen Hogan wiping away tears.
As the Tornadoes walked back to their bus under guard, they each were handed a bag for the ride home—a burger...and an encouraging letter from a Faith player.
The Gainesville coach saw Hogan, grabbed him hard by the shoulders and said, "You'll never know what your people did for these kids tonight. You'll never, ever know."
And as the bus pulled away, all the Gainesville players crammed to one side and pressed their hands to the window, staring at these people they'd never met before, watching their waves and smiles disappearing into the night.
Anyway, with the economy six feet under and Christmas running on about three and a half reindeer, it's nice to know that one of the best presents you can give is still absolutely free.
Hope.
So yeah, it is a bit campy. But, every once in a while you come across people doing something so simple and so right. Calling an inmate by name. Rooting for the underdog. Offering a Meal.
My High School - the Southern Baptist One - used the games against Juvenile Justice Schools as a chance to pad their stats, to run-up the score. Grapevine Faith got something we didn't back in High School. Caring for somebody is a lot bigger than football.
We've spent a lot of time over the past few weeks discussing the politics of Prayers. Well, here is a prayer that I can get behind.